In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

52 Chapter 4 Maurice Isserman.“Dissent in the Fifties and Sixties,”24 January 1982; 21 October 1982. Introduction Maurice Isserman, noted for his revisionist views of the Communist Party, conducted this pair of unpublished interviews to collect material for an intellectual history of twentieth-century American radicalism, If I Had a Hammer . . . The Death of the Old Left and the Birth of the New Left (1987). Born in 1951, Isserman’s formative years coincided with the radicalism of the Civil Rights Movement and Vietnam protests. During his time at Reed College, he lived in a revolutionary collective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Rochester in 1979 as a student of Eugene Genovese, the eminent scholar of slavery and the American South and a long-time Marxist (who would later move to the right). Isserman’s dissertation on American Communism had put him at odds with Howe; indeed he criticized Howe and Lewis Coser’s The American Communist Party (1957) as too severe on the far Left and for giving ammunition to the Right. At that time Isserman was far more sympathetic than Howe to the positions of people such as Communist leader Earl Browder, who defended the Soviet Union. Isserman also corresponded with Dorothy Healey, onetime head of the American Communist Party’s Southern California branch. The two would later work together on Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party (1990). Although Isserman’s revised dissertation, Which Side Were You On? The American Communist Party during the Second World War, came out the same year as this interview, Isserman’s own politics at the time were already altering toward a more moderate path in the Left-liberal direction of Irving Howe. Like Interview with Maurice Isserman, January and October 1982 53 the 1950s, the 1980s were a time when the Left felt itself in limbo; this interview reviews important elements of its history in a search for continuity and for a possible path to the future. Indeed, the interview reveals the idea of revolutionary change as illusory given the history and culture of the United States, which tends toward long periods of relatively conservative quiescence punctuated with bursts of upheaval. It is during these bursts that the Left has had a chance to see some of its ideas enacted, albeit in a piecemeal fashion, as in the New Deal reforms of Franklin D. Roosevelt. From its start, a primary raison d’être of Dissent was to serve as a platform to promoting left-wing ideals during the conservative 1950s, a role it found itself repeating at the time of this interview, at the outset of Ronald Reagan’s presidency . Significantly, the interview occurred at the very moment when A Margin of Hope was being published, a time during which Howe looked back nostalgically on the first two postwar decades. He explains: “We were learning to work piecemeal, treating Socialist thought as inherently problematic, quite as every other mode of political thought must be treated in our time.”1 This “piecemeal” approach sometimes meant that Dissent gave way to an almost postmodern political fragmentation, though Howe himself would never put it that way. He was no postmodernist. Desperately wanting to revive the Left but realizing he could not, he nonetheless hoped to leave a historical record, perhaps for future generations to complete this task. In looking back on the 1950s and 1960s, the years of birth and coming to maturity of Dissent, Howe speaks with a touch of defiant pride that his magazine had survived, that it had even achieved an honorable reputation. Indeed, the history of Dissent is a crucial part of the story of Irving Howe; his life and the biography of the magazine are interwoven far more than is the case with any other person associated with it. Coser and Brian Morton moved on to focus on other interests, whether scholarly or literary, and Michael Walzer and Mitchell Cohen, the current editors, have never been so fully identified with the magazine as was Howe. This interview is part of the backward-looking stance characteristic of Howe’s work since the mid-1970s, when he began work on World of Our Fathers. It continued throughout his last two decades—hence the span of this collection is characterized by a backward glance that eyes a possible future: the search for a legacy for Howe, Dissent, and the utopian ideals of Socialism. Dissent aspired in the 1960s to renew the Left, somehow to bridge the...

Share